Part 1 (2/2)

The people who wanted her dead had already lost some blood and she found herself suddenly smiling as she drove, remembering. It was odd how comfortable she was with killing people these days, how satisfying she found it. She had become bloodthirsty, which was ironic, all things considered. She'd spent six years under their tutelage, and in all that time they hadn't come close to breaking her down, to turning her into someone who enjoyed her work. But three years on the run from them had changed a lot of things.

She knew she wouldn't enjoy killing an innocent person. She was sure that corner had not been turned, nor would it be. Some people in her line of work-her former line-were well and truly psychotic, but she liked to think that this was the reason her peers were not as good as she was. They had the wrong motivations. Hating what she did gave her the power to do it best.

In the context of her current life, killing was about winning. Not the entire war, just one small battle at a time, but each was still a win. Someone else's heart would stop beating and hers would keep going. Someone would come for her, and instead of a victim he would find a predator. A brown recluse spider, invisible behind her gossamer trap.

This was what they had made her. She wondered if they took any pride at all in their accomplishment or if there was only regret that they hadn't stomped on her fast enough.

Once she was a few miles down the interstate, she felt better. Her car was a popular model, a thousand identical vehicles on the highway with her now, and the stolen plates would be replaced as soon as she found a safe spot to stop. There was nothing to tie her to the town she'd just left. She'd pa.s.sed two exits and taken a third. If they wanted to blockade the freeway, they'd have no idea where to do it. She was still hidden. Still safe for now.

Of course, driving straight home was out of the question at this point. She took six hours on the return, twisting around various highways and surface roads, constantly checking to be sure there was no one following. By the time she finally got back to her little rented house-the architectural equivalent of a jalopy-she was already half asleep. She thought about making coffee, weighing the benefits of the caffeine boost against the burden of one extra task, and decided to just muscle through it on the vapors of her energy supply.

She dragged herself up the two rickety porch steps, automatically avoiding the rot-weakened spot on the left of the first tread, and unlocked the double dead bolts on the steel security door she'd installed her first week living here; the walls-just wooden studs, drywall, plywood, and vinyl siding-didn't provide the same level of security, but statistically, intruders went for the door first. The bars on the windows were not an insurmountable obstacle, either, but they were enough to motivate the casual cat burglar to move on to an easier target. Before she twisted the handle, she rang the doorbell. Three quick jabs that would look like one continuous push to anyone watching. The sound of the Westminster chimes was only slightly m.u.f.fled by the thin walls. She stepped through the door quickly-holding her breath, just in case. There was no quiet crunch of broken gla.s.s, so she exhaled as she shut the door behind her.

The home security was all her own design. The professionals she'd studied in the beginning had their own methods. None of them had her specialized skill set. Neither did the authors of the various novels she used as implausible manuals now. Everything else she had needed to know had been easy to pull up on YouTube. A few parts from an old was.h.i.+ng machine, a microcontroller board ordered online, a new doorbell, and a couple of miscellaneous acquisitions, and she had herself a solid b.o.o.by trap.

She locked the dead bolts behind her and hit the switch closest to the door to turn on the lights. It was set in a panel with two other switches. The middle was a dummy. The third switch, the farthest from the door, was patched into the same low-voltage signal wire as the doorbell. Like that fixture and the door, the panel of switches was newer by decades than anything else in the small front room that was living area, dining room, and kitchen combined.

Everything looked as she'd left it: minimal, cheap furnis.h.i.+ngs-nothing big enough for an adult to hide behind-empty counters and tabletop, no ornaments or artwork. Sterile. She knew that even with the avocado-and-mustard-vinyl flooring and the popcorn ceiling, it still looked a little like a laboratory.

Maybe the smell was what made it feel like a lab. The room was so scrupulously sanitary, an intruder would probably attribute the pool-supply-store scent to cleaning chemicals. But only if he got inside without triggering her security system. If he triggered the system, he wouldn't have time to register many details about the room.

The rest of the house was just a small bedroom and bathroom, set in a straight line from the front door to the far wall, nothing in the way to trip her. She turned the light off, saving herself the walk back.

She stumbled through the only door into her bedroom, sleepwalking through the routine. Enough light made it through the mini-blinds-red neon from the gas station across the street-that she left the lamp off. First, she rearranged two of the long feather pillows on top of the double mattress that took up most of the s.p.a.ce in the room into the vague shape of a human body. Then the Ziploc bags full of Halloween costume blood were stuffed into the pillowcases; close up, the blood wasn't very convincing, but the Ziplocs were for an attacker who broke the window, pushed the blinds aside, and shot from that vantage point. He wouldn't be able to detect the difference in the neon half-light. Next, the head-the mask she'd used was another after-Halloween-sale acquisition, a parody of some political also-ran that had fairly realistic skin coloring. She'd stuffed it to roughly match the size of her own head and sewn a cheap brunette wig into place. Most important, a tiny wire, threaded up between the mattress and box spring, was hidden in the strands of nylon. A matching wire pierced through the pillow the head rested on. She yanked the sheet up, then the blanket, patted it all into shape, then twisted together the frayed ends of the two wires. It was a very tenuous joining. If she touched the head even lightly or jostled the pillow body a bit, the wires would slip silently apart.

She stood back and gave the decoy a once-over through half-closed eyes. It wasn't her best work, but it did look like someone was asleep in the bed. Even if an intruder didn't believe it was Chris, he would still have to neutralize the sleeping body before he went on to search for her.

Too tired to change into her pajamas, she just stepped out of her loose jeans. It was enough. She grabbed the fourth pillow and pulled her sleeping bag out from under the bed; they felt bulkier and heavier than usual. She dragged them into the compact bathroom, dumped them in the tub, and did the bare minimum of ablutions. No face-was.h.i.+ng tonight, just cleaning the teeth.

The gun and the gas mask were both under the sink, hidden beneath a stack of towels. She pulled the mask over her head and tightened the straps, then clapped her palm over the filter port and inhaled through her nose to check the seal. The mask suctioned to her face just fine. It always did, but she never let familiarity or exhaustion make her skip the safety routine. She moved the gun into the wall-mounted soap dish within easy reach above the bathtub. She didn't love the gun-she was a decent shot compared with a totally untrained civilian, but not in the same cla.s.s as a professional. She needed the option, though; someday her enemies were going to figure her system out, and the people coming for her would be in gas masks, too.

Honestly, she was surprised her shtick had saved her this long.

With an unopened chemical-absorption canister tucked under her bra strap, she shuffled the two steps back into the bedroom. She knelt beside the floor vent on the right side of the bed she'd never used. The vent cover grille probably wasn't as dusty as it should be, the grille's top screws were only halfway in, and the bottom screws were missing altogether, but she was sure no one looking through the window would notice these details or understand what they meant if he did; Sherlock Holmes was about the only person she wasn't worried would make an attempt on her life.

She loosened the top screws and removed the grille. A few things would be immediately obvious to anyone who looked inside the vent. One, the back of the vent was sealed off, so it was no longer functional. Two, the large white bucket and the big battery pack probably didn't belong down there. She pried the lid off the bucket and was immediately greeted by the same chemical smell that infused the front room, so familiar she barely noted it.

She reached into the darkness behind the bucket and pulled out, first, a small, awkward contraption with a coil, metal arms, and thin wires, then a gla.s.s ampoule about the size of her finger, and, finally, a rubber cleaning glove. She positioned the solenoid-the device she'd scavenged from a discarded was.h.i.+ng machine-so that the arms extending from it were half submerged in the colorless liquid inside the bucket. She blinked hard twice, trying to force herself into alertness; this was the delicate part. She put the glove on her right hand, then pulled the canister free from her bra strap and held it ready in her left. With the gloved hand, she carefully inserted the ampoule into the grooves she'd drilled into the metal arms for this purpose. The ampoule rested just under the surface of the acid, the white powder inside it inert and harmless. However, if the current running through the wires that were attached so tenuously atop the bed were to be interrupted, the pulse would snap the solenoid shut, and the gla.s.s would shatter. The white powder would turn into a gas that was neither inert nor harmless.

It was essentially the same arrangement that she had in the front room; the wiring was just simpler here. This trap was set only while she slept.

She replaced the glove and the vent cover and then, with a feeling that was not quite buoyant enough to be called relief, lurched back to the bathroom. The door, like the vent, might have tipped off someone as detail oriented as Mr. Holmes-the soft rubber liners around all the edges were definitely not standard. They wouldn't entirely seal the bathroom off from the bedroom, but they would give her more time.

She half fell into the tub, a slow-motion collapse onto the puffy sleeping bag. It had taken her a while to get used to sleeping in the mask, but now she didn't even think about it as she gratefully closed her eyes.

She s.h.i.+mmied herself into the down-and-nylon coc.o.o.n, squirming till the hard square of her iPad was nestled against the small of her back. It was plugged into an extension cord that got power from the front-room wiring. If the power fluctuated along that line, the iPad would vibrate. She knew from experience that it was enough to wake her, even as tired as she was tonight. She also knew that she could have the canister-still in her left hand, hugged tight against her chest like a child's teddy bear-unsealed and screwed into place on the gas mask in less than three seconds, despite being half awake, in the dark, and holding her breath. She'd practiced so many times, and then she'd proved herself during the three emergencies that had not been practice. She'd survived. Her system worked.

Exhausted as she was, she had to let her mind tick over the evils of her day before it would let her be unconscious. It felt horrible-like phantom-limb pain, not connected to any actual piece of her body, just there anyway-knowing they'd found her again. She wasn't satisfied with her e-mail response, either. She'd come up with the plan too impulsively to be sure of it. And it required her to act more quickly than she'd like.

She knew the theory-sometimes, if you ran headlong at the guy holding the gun, you could catch him off guard. Flight was always her favorite move, but she didn't see a way out of the alternative this time. Maybe tomorrow, after her tired brain had rebooted.

Surrounded by her web, she slept.

CHAPTER 2.

As she sat waiting for Carston to show, she thought about the other times the department had tried to kill her.

Barnaby-Dr. Joseph Barnaby, her mentor, the last friend she'd known-had prepared her for the first attempt. But even with all his foresight, planning, and deep-rooted paranoia, it was just dumb luck in the form of an extra cup of black coffee that had saved her life.

She hadn't been sleeping well. She'd worked with Barnaby for six years at that point, and a little more than halfway through that time, he'd told her his suspicions. At first she hadn't wanted to believe he could be right. They were only doing their job as directed, and doing it well. You can't think of this as a long-term situation, he'd insisted, though he'd been in the same division for seventeen years. People like us, people who have to know things that no one wants us to know, eventually we become inconvenient. You don't have to do anything wrong. You can be perfectly trustworthy. They're the ones you can't trust.

So much for working for the good guys.

His suspicions had become more specific, then s.h.i.+fted into planning, which had evolved into physical preparation. Barnaby had been a big believer in preparation, not that it had done him any good in the end.

The stress had begun to escalate in those last months as the date for the exodus approached, and, unsurprisingly, she'd had trouble sleeping. That particular April morning it had taken two cups of coffee rather than the usual one to get her brain going. Add that extra cup to the smaller-than-average bladder in her smaller-than-average body, and you ended up with a doctor running to the can, too rushed to even log out, rather than sitting at her desk. And that's where she had been when the killing gas filtered through the vents into the lab. Barnaby had been exactly where he was supposed to be.

His screams had been his final gift to her, his last warning.

They both had been sure that when the blow came, it wouldn't happen at the lab. Messy that way. Dead bodies usually raised a few eyebrows, and smart murderers tried to keep that kind of evidence as far removed from themselves as possible. They didn't strike when the victim was in their own living room.

She should have known never to underestimate the arrogance of the people who wanted her dead. They didn't worry about the law. They were too cozy with the people who made those laws. She also should have respected the power of pure stupidity to take a smart person completely by surprise.

The next three times had been more straightforward. Professional contractors, she a.s.sumed, given that they'd each worked alone. Only men so far, though a woman was always a possibility in the future. One man had tried to shoot her, one to stab her, and one to brain her with a crowbar. None of these tries had been effective because the violence had happened to pillows. And then her a.s.sailants had died.

The invisible but very caustic gas had silently flooded the small room-it took about two and a half seconds once the connection between the wires was broken. After that, the a.s.sa.s.sin was left with a life expectancy of approximately five seconds, depending on his height and weight. It would not have been a pleasant five seconds.

Her bathtub mixture was not the same thing they'd used for Barnaby, but it was close enough. It was the simplest way she knew to kill someone so swiftly and so painfully. And it was a renewable resource, unlike many of her weapons. All she needed was a good stock of peaches and a pool-supply store. Nothing that required restricted access or even a mailing address, nothing that her pursuers could track.

It really p.i.s.sed her off that they'd managed to find her again.

She'd been furious since waking yesterday and had only gotten angrier as the hours pa.s.sed while she made her preparations.

She had forced herself to nap and then drove all the next night in a suitable car, rented using a very weak ID for one Taylor Golding and a recently obtained credit card in the same name. Early this morning, she'd arrived in the city she least wanted to be in, and that had turned her anger up to the next level. She'd returned the car to a Hertz near Ronald Reagan National Airport, then walked across the street to another company and rented a new one with District of Columbia plates.

Six months ago, she would have done things differently. Gathered her belongings from the small house she was renting, sold her current vehicle on Craigslist, purchased a new one for cash from some private citizen who didn't keep records, and then driven aimlessly for a few days until she found a medium-size city-town that looked right. There she'd start the process of staying alive all over again.

But now there was that stupid, twisted hope that Carston was telling the truth. A very anemic hope. It probably wouldn't have been enough motivation on its own. There was something else-a small but irritating worry that she had neglected a responsibility.

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